Should we just fuck on this pavement square and get it over with? Amos was shorter than most of the guys I’d been with. “Napoleonic sexy,” as Vadis dubbed him after a digital slideshow. Amos looking pained on a panel. Amos looking pained at a party. Amos looking pained on a dock in Maine. A real-estate broker who was not Amos at all. Success had unlocked his grooming. He’d always been a fancy person trapped in a starving artist’s body. It was the jawline, destined for good suits and clearly defined from the neck like a Pez dispenser.
I offered my hand to the tall man, feeling Amos’s eyes trained on my breasts.
“We’ve met,” he said, taking my hand, “a couple of times. Roger.”
I was sorry Roger didn’t have his own ex-girlfriend to screw on his own pavement square, but there was no need to punish me for it.
“Of course,” I said, shaking my head. “Are you guys working together?”
“As in, is he my author?”
No, as in on a construction site.
“Yes, as in that.”
“I wish,” Roger said.
“He wishes,” Amos confirmed, as if some fantastic joke had passed between them.
“So why aren’t you? I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Amos is a very brilliant writer. I’m sure he has another book or six in him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to mess with Jeannine.”
“Jeannine Bonner,” I said, just to prove that some people’s names were worth remembering.
“Jeannine is very proprietary,” said Amos, as if it were a burden to be claimed by a legendary editor, to be conversant in her personality.
Roger removed his glasses and began cleaning them on his shirt. He was at least five years junior to Amos and me, as many as eight. I got a whiff of a roommate. Laminate flooring. Roach traps.
“I hope you didn’t pay for dinner,” I said, “since Amos is the property of another woman.”
“More like the other way around,” tittered Roger.
“By which you mean that Amos makes women his property? Is that a thing we’re admitting in public now?”
“Can you believe we used to date?” Amos asked, and then to me: “Are we getting a drink or what? Roger has to go home so he can wake up to a screaming baby.”
Roger released a theatrical sigh. My eyes zipped down to his left hand as my brain confirmed the improbable calculus—yes, his left was my right and there was a gold band on it. The roach traps vanished, replaced by soft toys and frozen breast milk. I could feel Death stringing cobwebs along the walls of my uterus like Christmas garlands.
“I need my jacket,” I announced.
I left with the understanding that Roger would have absented himself by the time I returned. It was helpful to have a buffer, but I did not enjoy this version of myself made uneasy by a young family.
Inside, my jacket was waiting, zombie-like over my chair.
“We went through your pockets,” said Vadis.
“Anything good?”
“Nothing. A pen. It’s broken.”
“Keep your coat off,” instructed Clive, stretching his arms. “Stay awhile.”
A waitress was flipping the chairs upside down, slamming wood against wood.
“Nope,” I said, “I’m leaving you all.”
“Booo,” said Zach, who was now drunk enough to express emotion.
Alcohol knocked the intellectual out of him. He would not like knowing that Amos Adler was outside. Amos was a more successful, more confident version of Zach. They were the same species. Same politics, same takes. This was the primary source of Zach’s distaste, a conclusion so obvious, he never reached it. Instead, he spent years analyzing why Amos Adler “sucked so hard.” I kissed them all in the vicinity of their faces, but when I got to Vadis, I whispered: Amos. Outside.
“What?!” she hissed, with a sharp “t.”
She twisted in her chair, as if taking in more of my body would reveal further truths. If there was further truth to be had, it was that I was shocked Vadis would remember Amos. She had inverse retention skills when it came to men. The more firmly planted someone was in my life, the more likely she was to give that person a dismissive nickname or forget his name altogether. One night, I told her that the reason she made up names for these men was so they could never be real. Because if they weren’t real, they couldn’t take me away from her. I don’t think I meant a word of it. But this is how you speak when you’re in a bathroom stall in your twenties, high on cocaine, and testing the depths of your friendships.